this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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I have a legitimate fear that such a thing is happening in the west, but on the other hand maybe it's for the best. The longer it takes for quality of life to fall so badly that even such "digital opium" doesn't suffice to soften it, the weaker the declining US will be when revolution comes.
I'm sure it's an avenue the capitalist west tries to pacify people through, but so are sports, film, music, etc., for that matter. If anything, video games may be one of the weaker means of that in the west because the industry is so overtaken by the worst tendencies of late stage capitalism that it can be radicalizing just to be a video game enthusiast. Not that one will necessary find their way to marxist-leninist theory because of being a disgruntled "gamer", but it can sure speed up their dislike of capitalism. I'm pretty sure it did speed it up in my case - just wasn't the only reason by far.
And a good example of it in media form, albeit a rare one, is the Jimquisition youtube channel. Steadily evolved from a channel critical of the video games industry's practices to a channel saying fuck it and just openly calling out capitalism as the problem.
I think this is why "Gamer" culture pushes far right views so much. A gamer examining how games are made and how much exploitation of workers goes into it, and how these incompetent companies make everything worse for everyone involved (except the ultra rich at the top) would naturally start to radicalise. So there needs to be a much louder right wing form of radicalisation that blames the "wokes" for these problems or else people will start getting ideas about capitalism and realise that the greatest video game ever made, Tetris, was made by the Soviets and therefore the only way gaming can have a decent future is through socialism.
Good point, makes sense.
I think this is an excellent point and something to really sit on. Games as an artform have flat-out not existed outside of the context of our modern neoliberal globalized world. Stories, music, and even movies have all had a chance to be produced under different economic contexts, but games have always been the realm of capitalists trying to make money.
It's probably why capital G gamers either turn into anti-woke chudsters (video games were better back in the day!) or hyper libleft political advocates (we'll solve all the problems of crunch with a developers union!!) Their preferred art medium is largely devoid of art that isn't completely subsumed by capital.
Yeah I think there was a brief window during the period where arcades were fading into obscurity and computer games were picking up where things were looking alright, probably because the internet had not been ironed out all that well yet so it was genuinely difficult to implement exploitative practices at that stage. And if you were watching games in that period and didn't understand capitalism, you might have assumed they'd continue to look alright and that the field would blossom into a unique artistic form.
But capitalism was there, the internet got streamlined, games got turned increasingly digital (phasing out of disks) and with it, it became easier and easier for publishers to exercise direct control over everything and turn it into a predatory nightmare. I want to say the infrastructure to start doing so was in place for a while, but they had to do some of it slow-burn to ease existing game audiences into it. Cause they didn't go straight from "$60 game and that's it, end of story" to "pay $10 for an in-game emote." They went from the first part to DLC, then DLC to some forms of "microtransactions" (which I think were actually more micro then, now they're more like macro sometimes), then microtransactions to lootboxes. I don't remember the exact order with other elements like season passes and special editions mixed in with everything else, but basically, there was a progression to it.
But in terms of "games as art", I think that is something computer games were struggling with even before all the lootbox type stuff. There was stuff like Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker game, a kind of satirical commentary on Facebook games of the time. And there was some other indie stuff trying to go in the "art" direction (some of it I learned about years ago, so I don't remember names). But have people ever accepted/considered video games to be an artform? That I'm not sure about. They had a big stigma before the monetization got so bad and by the time they became more mainstream, they were at the peak of some of their worst elements for the computerized medium.
So yeah, it may be safe to say they've yet to have had a chance to exist outside of the intense capitalist form. I am curious how game development has gone in China as a whole. If they've managed to go more in the artistic direction or if the moneymaking aspect has an overpowering effect there too.
We're very much on the same wavelength here. I think games are materially and inherently artistic projects, but are overwhelmingly produced in a way that's more adjacent to toys. Problem is the latter is much more profitable than the former. Games with addictive gameloops are much more valued by developers and publishers than a game that uses its mechanics to deliver a message.
It's such a sorry state of affairs that I think games as art are the exception, and not the norm. Games can clearly be art in how they use mechanics to make you feel something, or say something about the human condition - see DayZ, Lisa, Undertale, Pathologic, etc. These games subvert mechanical expectation and force the player to feel something other than fun/challenge.
But those four games are what came to the top of my head, and I don't believe the list of 'mechanic as the message' games extends more than a few dozen. The market is otherwise made up of pure toys (Fortnite, Call of Duty, etc) or games that carry the aesthetic of art but use nothing from the medium to extend its message (Last of Us, Telltale games, most AAA 'cinematic' experiences). These games can easily be movies and the impact is the exact same. In the case of Last of Us, this is provably true.
So, like, no, games aren't really considered art, are they? They clearly can be art, they have been art, and they have amazing ways to impact us, but the productive forces behind this entire artform are not interested in that. They're exclusively interested in the money they can extract from younger audiences. Such is capitalism, right?
I hear that video games can be art in the same way board or card games can be. Where the mechanics or challenge is the art in of itself. Like how music doesn't need lyrics to be art.
Agreed, well said.